Students getting hot under the collar…

The National Archives are not what you expect; there is no huge library or miles and miles of bookcases. What there is, is a small shop, a museum and a café. There is also a reading room from which you can order any of over one hundred million documents stored in ten million boxes from mile after mile of storage rooms. Over one hundred miles in fact, that’s half the distance from London to Blackpool. No one actually knows how many documents are stored in the National Archives, there are so many in fact that they ran out of room and had to bury all the least used ones in an old salt mine. You can have a look at those, but there’s a four day waiting time for them to be fetched. On the day we went we got to see inside the storage rooms, something the public is not normally allowed to do; the documents are stored at optimum temperature (19.4 ºc as a keen eyed friend of mine noticed on the thermostat) to stop them turning into something that looks like what is left of a £5 note after it’s been in the wash. There is over one thousand years of British Government documents in the National Archives although only about 5% of Government documents are kept - notes to the Prime Minister’s secretary requesting a cup of tea are not of much historical interest).

...studying the Cold War!

The story of how all of this came about is a funny one; it used to be that all Government documents were simply rolled up and put in boxes. One day a civil servant was sent to fetch some of these documents but when he opened the right box he found only half the document and a dead rat! You can guess what happened. He then walked into a cabinet meeting waving this dead rat about demanding a proper storage place for the documents and instead of being fired on the spot he got what he wanted. Strange but true and the result is now a massive building in Kew.

George Young, 10Wy